


that you love (the high hawk season remix)

by byzantienne



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Evil Space Boyfriends, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Remix, reverse POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 20:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>This, before much of anything else: that General Hux held out his hand like the last spar of a ruined pier, and in the midst of the endless black lake of his pain, Kylo Ren took it. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	that you love (the high hawk season remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [all that you love will be carried away](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5741020) by [coldhope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope). 
  * Inspired by [all that you love will be carried away](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5741020) by [coldhope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope). 



> A reverse-POV remix of coldhope's gorgeous _all that you love will be carried away_ , with her gracious permission and fantastic encouragement. The dialogue and much of the choreography is hers.
> 
> Go there first. That's the theme. This is the counterpoint.

**0**

Between the bowed trees, the vast dark-red arch of the sky was a wheel that spun and spat snow as if the atmosphere hadn't noticed yet that its planet was dying. Kylo Ren stared up at it because there was nowhere else to look. The world heaved under his spine, buckled, split. The thin veneer of livable environment sloughing away. All interventions and defenses done with: only the molten devouring core of everything remained, inside his chest and beneath it, a last and total response to brute insult.

He didn't feel anything. He'd been using the pain to keep going, all the way through that impossible, humiliating fight, and now he didn't even have that – only iced-over numbness, and the magma-colored sky. Serene and unfeeling at last, and all he'd had to do was bleed out. So simple.

There were figures in the trees – Force-ghosts or hallucinations or the girl and her pet traitor (and Chewie – _fuck_ ) come back to make sure he was finished for good. He hoped the planet immolated him before they got close enough. He hoped the planet and General Hux's ridiculous sunbeam weapon went supernova and immolated the entire quadrant of the galaxy – which (absurd thought) would probably make Hux happy – 

Ren closed his eyes and went determinedly _away._

**6**

Amongst a whole list of other, less neutral adjectives, General Hux was not very tall. When they were standing this close together, one on either side of the doorframe to Hux's quarters on the _Dark Heart,_ he had to look up at Ren to snap "What?" at him. As if he never got any visitors. Perhaps he _didn't._ Perhaps Ren was the very first person who had taken the time to bother him after hours. That would explain a great deal about the man.

Frustratingly, not enough: he _had_ answered the door.

"I believe this is yours," Ren said, holding out the folded bundle of Hux's coat to him. Hux looked up at him, looked down at the coat, looked up at him again. He bled confusion into the air like a miasma.

"You've had my coat this whole time?"

"It's a very nice coat," Ren told him. "As I've mentioned before."

Hux's expression was incomprehensible. "What the … _why,"_ he said, and slumped against the doorframe. It was incongruous and absurd of him. General Hux didn't slump against anything, unless he was on the verge of absolute exhausted misery, and Ren had only seen that – well. Once, really. Once, and it had mostly been his fault.

"Hells. Come in," Hux said, and levered himself back to uprightness, taking the coat from Ren's hands – Ren felt light without the weight of it, and a little bereft – and getting out of the way. Ren checked over his shoulder. The hall was empty of troopers and scuttling administrators and anyone else who would have an _opinion,_ so he ducked under the frame and let Hux close the door behind him.

He'd unfolded the coat and immediately wrapped himself in it. Ren could hardly believe how much more comfortable he looked; he'd grabbed the lapels, one in each hand, and pulled the coat as close to him as possible. "Sit down," he said, as if the angular cluster of chairs around a little table in his suite were in some way appealing. 

Ren sat anyway. Sat, and looked at the floor instead of Hux. Watching the lines of tension on his face dissolve – melt, like he'd stopped some kind of constant internal shivering – made his chest ache. "You dreamed," he said, still looking at the floor, because people didn't dream about him unless he'd intended them to. Or unless he'd hurt them enough that they'd dream about him as a symbolic representation of being hurt, and those sorts of people were never on ships _he_ was on long enough for it to become a problem.

"It happens," Hux said.

Ren tried again. "You dreamed about me."

"Yes," Hux said, still nestling in the coat.

"You dreamed about _saving_ me."

"Are you going to sit there and make obvious and dreadfully awkward observations all evening? I'm not sure what it is you want from me."

Ren wished _he_ knew. "Neither am I," he said. He'd come here with the coat because it didn't seem fair to keep it, not when Hux was broadcasting dream-blasted _cold_ and _panic_ and flickering images of his own body, awkward in Hux's arms, shielded against all the vast sucking chill of vacuum. He'd never dreamed about those things while he'd had the coat; Ren should just – give it back. Fix it. He reached up to his throat, to the pneumatic fasteners that held his mask to his collar. They hissed when he flipped them open and took the mask off. "I should not want _anything_ from you."

"No," said Hux.

The mask enhanced his vision. It gave him infrared and night-vision and visible magnetic fields, which were not exactly like seeing the Force but sometimes reminded him of it. When he took it off he always felt momentarily disoriented, stuck with only his own eyes. This time, looking at Hux looking at him, it wasn't even any easier to breathe unfiltered air.

"I do," Ren said, out of some impulse toward honesty he didn't want to look too closely at.

"Oh," Hux said, and was practically dripping incomprehension again, loud enough that Ren felt equally confused just off the bleedthrough.

He tried, "I don't know what to do," which was at least accurate, if also horrible and true, and more horrible for being true.

That, Hux seemed to be able to answer. "We have a job to do. In another day we'll be in the Kellan system. You're supposed to be looking for the girl."

Of course. He was supposed to be _repairing his previous error._ It was remarkable how well he could remember Snoke's exact tone; the things Snoke said to him stuck like afterimages and echoed all the time. Of course Hux would be fixated on mission parameters, since they'd come down from the Supreme Leader himself. Ren had no idea where he'd come up with the notion that General Hux thought seriously about anything but orders and fulfilling them exactly. He didn't know why he felt so bitterly disappointed. "Yes," he said. "The girl."

And then Hux sat down in the chair next to Ren's, coat and all, and said, "Tell me about her. What happened back there? What was so terrible about your failure?"

"You really want to know?" Ren's hair had gotten in his eyes again, which was a mercy. It was unbearable to look at Hux directly, in an entirely different way than any other unbearable emotion: like pressing too hard on a bruise, an ache he could lean into if pressing on bruises wasn't stupid. Not every kind of pain could be used as fuel for the Dark, though everything about Ren's life would probably be easier if they could.

Hux said, "Yes. I think I need to know, if we are to work together."

If Ren reached out – and it didn't take much, it took only the slightest amount of attention to see what Hux was thinking, catch each image strung like pearls on a cord, had no one ever told him to keep his thoughts locked inside his own mind (of course not, he wasn't Force-sensitive, whatever his Imperial adolescence had been like, it wouldn't have needed to involve endless rounds of _meditation,_ no one would have made him try to be quiet) – when Ren reached out, all the cascading images were of _him._ His hands wrapped around Hux's tunic like there was nothing else solid in the universe, and that wasn't even a memory, though it was clear enough to have been.

He'd dreamed of _saving_ him. Like he needed saving.

"Very well," Ren said, deciding to answer even as he answered. "I will tell you. But I warn you, General, it is a long story, and you will not be getting a great deal of rest this night."

Hux's expression was fixed between his habitual displeasure and something else Ren couldn't make sense of. "I've done without sleep before," he said. "I don't want to subtract from the inherent drama of the situation, Lord Ren, but this will not actually represent the first time I've missed my set hours of rest."

It was possible General Hux was trying to make a joke. Ren didn't want to be smiling, not when he was about to explain why everything on Starkiller had gone so terribly wrong; he was smiling anyway. It didn't seem to have much to do with how he felt. He shoved his hair back out of his face. "I don't suppose you have anything to drink," he asked. "Only – this will not be pleasant."

Hux got up and went to the cabinet. He extracted a bottle of Luranian brandy and brought it back, sinking down into the same chair. "The amenities do not run to cut-crystal tumblers, I'm afraid. But I shall endeavor to bear the hardship, if you don't mind."

"Very well," Ren said again, and reached out for the bottle. Their hands touched as he took it, and Ren was struck by a vivid awareness that Hux was a physical presence. Not only a collection of projected thought-images, or a continuous force that infuriatingly kept ships running, but an embodied person that breathed right next to him. Whose fingers were chilled and softer than he'd expected them to be, shockingly there.

"I shall miss that coat, you know," Ren told him, and then, bracing, he got started.

**1**

This, before much of anything else: that General Hux had held out his hand like the last spar of a ruined pier, and in the midst of the endless black lake of his pain, Kylo Ren took it.

 _Everything_ had hurt. The pulp of his side, the scouring burn down his cheek, thinking or not thinking. Thinking was recalling the reflected sheen of his lightsaber on the girl's face, the same sheen which had been on his – not thinking was worse, was all agony without any control to frame it. He needed – he could destroy this entire transport, all the flimsy barely-shielded reactor cores going off at once – 

He'd taken General Hux's offered hand in his and walked down that pier like a man on a high wire, dragging every inch of the weight of pain behind him: walked with the Force into the ordered and resonant vault-chamber of his mind. The whole of the man was faded over with a grey and determined exhaustion. Ren had no use for him, had never liked him, the officious fucking martinet.

Hux thought, quite loudly for someone who wasn't Force-sensitive, _Hang on._

He could have left him on Starkiller, to bleed out into the snow. He hadn't. 

So: _I'll try,_ Ren told him.

After that it had been very bad, and then he was unconscious.

**3**

Recovery was boring at the best of times, which this wasn't. Ren lay in the dark feeling his body knit back together, one muscle filament at a time, and trying not to think about Starkiller – which was like trying not to think about breathing. Every time he inhaled his side reminded him he was still pushing air in and out of his lungs, back and forth, ceaseless endless oxygen-hungry flesh that hadn't served him well enough to beat that untrained, rapacious girl. That _had_ served him just well enough to flip the switch on his lightsaber and kill Solo _at last_ and nevertheless ached and cringed and wept with insufficiency that he couldn't get away from. Neither rage nor ignoring how he felt did anything. Every infinitesimal use of the Force to speed his healing was a claxon reminder that he'd not won far enough free of the Light for anything to _matter_ –

It didn't help that the _Finalizer_ was not in fact large enough, _Resurgent_ -class ship or not, to keep him from overhearing General Hux declaim inside his head about how Ren was a _histrionic twerp._ That was _amazingly_ unfair. Hux had no idea what he had to deal with.

It had been going on for ages, and the declamation was shaded over with white-green spikes of anxious tension every time Hux thought about Supreme Leader Snoke or the late, great, apparently over-invested in his son's holosim performance Brendol Hux. Contemplating that – or any analogous comparison he might draw – was going to make Ren even more nauseated than he already was.

_Would you mind thinking a little less noisily?_ he sent, out of pure exasperation. 

Hux's reaction, wherever he was, was just as loud as his internal monologuing had been. _Get out of my head._

_I'm not_ in _your head,_ Ren explained, with more mercy than Hux strictly deserved. _As I said before, you are broadcasting. Yours is a particularly, shall we say,_ forceful _mind._

_I'm doing no such thing._

He had no idea! Ren snickered, and then stopped when doing anything with his diaphragm aside from breathing hurt too much to bother with. _Which one of us has the experience here?_ he asked. _I don't particularly_ enjoy _listening to you rant about me. You do it an awful lot._

_I do not,_ Hux thought back at him, incensed. _And I wouldn't have to if you didn't behave so atrociously all the damned time, so kindly shut up._

Ren would do no such thing. It wasn't as if _Hux_ would shut up. 

Projecting all the revelatory tone of Snoke at the Supreme Leader's most effective, he said: _You feel a conflict. It is not one you are used to, I think._

_Of course I don't,_ Hux said. Ren could practically hear him trying to shove all possible feelings of conflict behind what he imagined were locked doors in his mind, and which weren't locked at all. _There is no conflict._

_You're lying, General,_ Ren told him, and got _affront_ back, affront with a fascinating flutter of interested surprise. He kept going. _You aren't particularly good at it, either; then again, I don't suppose you've had a lot of practice._

_I'll overlook the gross insult if you stop talking, right now, and stay out of my mind._

_I can't promise anything. You're the one who's emoting at the top of his mental voice._

Hux said, _What –_ and then again, quieter and more focused, _What do I have to do to make you stop?_

Ren thought about it; thought about how when he was talking to Hux, he at least wasn't paying attention to anything else. _Come and talk to me,_ he said. _I'm bored. It's objectively boring, lying here and awaiting one's unspecified but undoubtedly unpleasant fate._

_No,_ Hux thought back, _I'm busy._ Some _of us around here have jobs to do._

Which was just like him. Ren was abruptly furious. Silkily, he thought _Suit yourself. But don't blame me for overhearing your thoughts, General. Especially the ones about your father. An interesting relationship, there._

_Shut up,_ Hux sent, and there, _there_ was enough ice to seal his mind up like a cauterized wound, flash-frozen.

**8 (I)**

The blowing snow rose off the ground in vicious shimmering sheets that spun upward, gravityless and blinding. Ren had never been so thankful for his mask and his hood; even through them he was devastatingly cold, the kind of cold that burned, but at least he could see and he was warm enough to move around. The readouts inside the mask were depressing – the ambient temperature gauge had dropped every time he glanced at it, and the heat-outlines of his own hands were a dim and unpleasant yellow instead of normal human red-orange.

The rest of the troopers had gone to ground inside their shelters; he should have done the same, except that he was following the cord of Hux's thoughts like a rope in the dark, since he couldn't raise him by comm. Since he hadn't heard from him since the storm had blown in, and it wasn't like him to not be shouting orders in everyone's ears – not like him at all, and Ren was discovering that he was not willing to allow something to have gone _wrong_ with Hux. Not after –

The mask picked him out before Ren did: a too-still, too-cold yellow heat-signature silhouette bleeding a corona of warmth into the snow. Ren would have missed him entirely if he'd been searching with his eyes; the snowfall had nearly covered his uniform, and the general visibility was shit.

He called out to him, hurrying forward. "Come with me!"

Hux looked up at him, pale like glass, no color in his skin at all. He opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something, failed, coughed. His lips had gone the same grey-blue as his eyes. On the second attempt he managed to ask "What have you found?" as if Ren had been looking for someone else entirely.

"The temperature's dropping too rapidly," Ren explained, "We underestimated the weather on this planetoid. I've made contact with the squad, they're dug in safely in their shelters. We have to wait this out, there's no way we can move in a storm this heavy."

Hux blinked, like nothing Ren said had made any sense to him. Snowflakes settled in his eyelashes and melted too slowly.

"Come on," Ren said, holding out his hand.

He saw Hux reach for it, reach and stagger like his limbs were a numb bundle of loosely-attached sticks. Ren was horrified. In the process of cursing out loud he found himself remembering every page of the First Order's Basic Field Handbook's list of hypothermia symptoms at once: vasoconstriction, lassitude, confusion, and a whole bunch of worse ones after that if the person's core temperature dropped too far and –

And if he just wrapped his arms around Hux they'd both freeze. The storm was only getting started.

He picked him up, one arm around his shoulders and the other tucked under his knees, and braced him against his chest. Hux didn't protest – that was _not good_ – but curled stiffly into him, his cheek on Ren's shoulder. It was – it made it easier to carry him. Ren gritted his teeth against the sharpness of the wind, turned into it, and tried not to jar him too much as he trudged back toward his own emergency tent, thinking _there's too much fucking snow in the galaxy,_ trying not to imagine the ground splitting open at his feet.

**5**

Inside one of the headaches, one of the bad kind, pain slipped from pressure into a kind of liquid agony centered around the orbit of Ren's right eye socket. Eventually he'd lean too hard on the Force and it would split the tiny feeder capillaries in his skull, like Starkiller going nova, and he'd bleed into his brain. Snoke would have to find some other promised savior of the galaxy – if he hadn't done that _already,_ or was planning to, but if the Supreme Leader was really done with him surely he wouldn't have spent so very much time making him retell every inch of his failures, under the weight of Force-driven compulsion. Like being asked to perform self-evisceration on fucking command, and the aftereffects lasted so _long._

So when Hux, inexplicably, decided it was more personable to stop standing by his bed for his version of an interrogation (it was, at least, a kinder interrogation, Ren could appreciate that) and instead sat down next to him, the shift of the mattress under his weight made the liquid pain inside his skull _pulse._ He bit back a useless, agonized noise, and shoved his fingertips against his forehead as if he could hold the pressure back.

"I'm sorry," Hux said, which was worse, because that meant he'd noticed. "I didn't realize. Is – are you –"

He sounded miserable, or else worried that Ren was going to vomit on him. Ren could at least disabuse him of the second option. "I have already been extremely sick a total of four times so far this evening, but if I anticipate a fifth I shall let you know, General," he said. He sounded _fine,_ to himself. Not at all like a stretched balloon full of molten lead. "Was there something in particular you wanted?"

"I didn't know you had these headaches."

"For reasons which should be obvious, I prefer not to advertise the fact," Ren told him. Carefully, he unpeeled his fingertips from his forehead; he didn't split apart. "Usually they _aren't_ this bad. Usually I haven't spent several hours in the presence of a powerful Force-user taking full advantage of the strength inherent in his own displeasure."

Even through closed eyes he could feel Hux looking at him; even half-deafened to thought by his own pain and the sick, lurching aftermath of Snoke's fury, he could still hear him think. He was terribly analytic, and also entirely wrong. It wasn't _torture,_ that word that had floated to the top of Hux's mind: what Snoke did was never so crude as _torture._ Torture was something that came from sadism. Snoke had Force-backed purposeful desire.

Purposeful desire could still hurt. "No," Ren explained, "Not torture. You would not understand. Nor would you be permitted to try."

After a long moment Hux said, "No, I don't understand, and I don't think I particularly want to. But from the point of view of a soldier, this strikes me as a poorly-thought-out maneuver."

Ren didn't think he'd ever heard Hux doubt the Supreme Leader in any fashion before, and certainly not out loud. "Careful, General," he said.

"What, is _he_ listening to my mind, too?"

He sounded so offended. Ren didn't understand how someone like General Hux – one of Snoke's favorite servitors! – could imagine that he wasn't being monitored all the time. Somehow Ren had always assumed that people like Hux either didn't know or didn't care. But Hux was holding himself so still, and it was – kind, in a way, that he would find the idea of what Snoke did to Ren unpleasant. Ren tried to explain. "Possibly," he said. "I don't know. This room is clean – at the moment, that is; I don't think he planned on the eventuality of my having a visitor – but everywhere else he is undoubtedly listening to your voice; this is his headquarters, and the Supreme Leader does so value information."

"All I mean," Hux said, ignoring entirely how Ren was, despite the headache, making an attempt to inform him of what he should have already realized, "is that if one has possession of a tactical asset, even if one is … _displeased_ … with its performance, taking that displeasure out on the asset itself is counterproductive, inefficient, and bad for morale."

"'Asset'," Ren repeated, trying out the word. "Is that what you think of me?"

"You know perfectly well what I think of you." 

Yes, because Hux insisted on complaining about him at broadcast volume all over the _Finalizer –_

But he kept going. "And what good does this do? How has incapacitating you, even temporarily, advanced the overall objective?"

Ren didn't know. He wasn't required to _know,_ only to _do._ He was an instrument, an instrument with the honor of being an agent in Snoke's hands and – _hells_ his head hurt. He tried opening his eyes; it couldn't make it worse. Hux was there, sitting on the bed, the palest spot in the room. His face drawn up with concern, all ice dissolved into consternation. Trying to make everything fit into the grand narrative where he got to stand on bridges and shout at people, and that was _sufficient._ "You think too much, General," Ren said to him. "Did anyone ever tell you that, when you were little?"

"No," he said.

"A pity. You might have been happier."

Hux stared at him. "Are you possibly having some sort of cerebral incident? You're making even less sense than usual. Can you move the extremities on both sides of your body?"

Ren wondered quite honestly if he _was,_ if talking with Hux like this – in the dark, with Hux so carefully seated inches away – was a last extinction-burst hallucination and wouldn't it be hilarious if it was, if his neurology coughed up General Hux being _concerned for him_ before it dissolved under pressure entirely – and found himself laughing. A mistake: he had to bring his hand back up to his face in a desperate attempt to keep the headache from overwhelming him.

Hux, as if in response, stood up, and Ren wanted nothing more than to curl to face the wall in sudden and inexplicable misery that he had.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

Hux didn't answer. Ren was devastatingly certain that he had in fact slipped out of the room; why _would_ he bother staying – and wished that he didn't feel as wretched about it as he did. He wished he didn't feel a lot of things; wishing hadn't ever helped. He squinted between his fingers, just to make sure, and – Hux had come back in from the refresher carrying a hand-towel.

"Put this over your eyes," he said.

There were, it turned out, gradations in inexplicable feelings. Misery could co-exist perfectly well with incomprehension and something slow and unfolding that might have been relief, and which let him at least take his hand away from his face – if Hux _meant_ it, then he'd have to _prove_ that he did –

"Or don't," Hux said, crossly. 

Ren couldn't bear to ask; it was bad enough that he _wanted._ He stretched out one hand, mutely.

And Hux came back, sat down with him. 

When he lay the towel – damp and cool – across Ren's eyes, the chill that swept through him was deep and terrible and sweet.

**7**

They had both been drinking for quite a while; the brandy bottle Ren was supporting entirely through the Force was half-empty. Hux had taken off the coat, and the pale skin of his cheeks was faintly alcohol-flushed as he reached towards the floating bottle, fingertips outstretched. Ren concentrated, watched him through the Force-ripples he could sometimes see like an overlay on the electromagnetic spectrum: his hand made small, insignificant eddies that Ren had no trouble adjusting for.

"That is the Force," Ren explained, and slowly set the bottle back down on the table. "It is around us, even in the vacuum of space; it is eternal and unchangeable, but it has two complimentary aspects, and that is where the concepts of dark and light come in."

"So it isn't just positive and negative phases of one sinusoidal signal," Hux said, and Ren was briefly delighted that Hux was the sort of person who would try to understand the Force using concepts constructed from engineering manuals. 

"No," he said, reaching to grab the bottle, with his hands this time, "although the analogy does hold some value." The brandy was a thick sweet burning down his throat. It made everything easier. "Both sides need to exist to balance one another. But it is possible for a user to influence, and be influenced by, only one side at a time; in fact, this is the principle that underlies the Jedi and the Sith."

At Hux's expression, he added hastily, "I am not Sith." The man was probably imagining child-devouring sybarites. "I do not – embrace the dark side in the manner that they did. But I am committed to the dark side nonetheless."

"The Jedi are all about the positive voltage," Hux said. He was quite astonishingly good at grasping some of the central ideas, however much he was filtering them through _physics._

"That is remarkably accurate while being technically wrong in almost every sense," Ren told him, and handed the bottle over. Hux drank deeply – Ren watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed, the minute shifts of musculature, and tried to distract himself by explaining. "They are strong with the light side of the Force and deliberately refrain from accessing the power and the strength of the dark side. Because of this abjuration they are required to work very hard indeed to shape and focus the light side of the Force. It is not an abjuration I would enjoy attempting."

Hux had set the bottle down. The insides of his lips were wet with brandy. "Is it a religion, then? They vow to renounce worldly things, and money, and the dark side?"

"Yes," said Ren, warm enough with alcohol to be able to think of being thirteen, at Skywalker's Jedi academy, getting up each morning before the dawn to meditate together with the other children, the slow increase in light and the yawning exhaustion, without the light side of all the Force in the room _screaming_ at him, "The Jedi are analogous to members of a holy order. Only the thing they worship is not just an idol, or an idea; it is real. It has power, and now that Skywalker has almost certainly been found by the Resistance, it is likely that we shall see its power close-up."

"So what's Snoke's angle on the light-and-dark thing?" Hux asked, leaning forward. Ren thought of a hunting hawk, poised on the fist. "Why is it that your particular balance is so valuable?"

"It isn't, now," Ren said. Like remembering, confession was easier to do surrounded by the soft buzz of brandy. Easier by far to frame a version of his failure for Hux than it had been for Snoke. Perhaps it was only that he was growing practiced at it. "I was a hope of his, and that hope proved unsatisfactory. Now he is looking for a new hope, and I am to help find it, if I can."

"You're not his sidearm anymore?"

How agonizingly apt. "No," Ren admitted. "I am yet his – creature. But the things he hoped I would be able to do are not – things I have done."

Quietly, Hux said, "You were talking about your father."

The alcohol wasn't enough; nothing in fact would be.

"Yes. My father." If he was precisely clinical, in the way that General Hux, officious resource-management-obsessive commander of many thousands of supply lines, would appreciate, perhaps he could get past this part. "He was not sensitive to the Force, but my mother is—and powerfully, although she never trained as a Jedi, as my uncle did."

"Skywalker," said Hux.

No, not even clinical precision would save him. The brandy was making him dizzy, now, dizzy and on the edge of vertiginous sickness. He took another swig of it anyway, and then slumped back in the chair. He found himself with his elbows on his thighs, his face almost in his hands; wasn't sure how he'd gotten there. The room spun. "Luke Skywalker," he said, acknowledging. "Whose life was spared, at the last, by Darth Vader, and that single act of sentiment brought about the ultimate destruction of the Empire and all it had worked to create."

"You did not want to make the same mistake Vader did," Hux said, very slowly. Ren could hear him thinking it through; the same mind that would see astrophysics in the Force, looking at everything he'd done on Starkiller and drawing conclusions from evidence. "That's why. But in the end it did not matter, and that is terrible to consider."

"It is – beyond _terrible,_ " Ren said, pressing his hands harder to his forehead. He felt like he was being flayed open, and Hux couldn't even _make_ him explain like Snoke could. He was just explaining anyhow. 

"Imagine what it would have been like had you given the command to fire, back on Starkiller," he began, framing it for Hux – thinking all the while of the texture of his lightsaber's ignition-switch, of how _long_ he had hesitated, the horrific paralyzation – "and everything you have spent your life working for turned out to be a failure. That the beam fired but could not do its intended work, or did not fire at all. Imagine that, Hux."

"What … happened next?" He must be imagining it; his voice would not sound like that if he wasn't.

It had taken such a long time for Solo to fall. The whole while Ren had been waiting for release, for purity of purpose, for a great unfettering of his heart – waiting and waiting and nothing was changed except the knowing that there was no deed profound enough to win him free of the light.

"My father fell from the bridge," Ren said, as evenly as he could. "His companions were there, and Chewbacca shot me with his bowcaster, and…" He needed to see Hux's face – he peered at him through his fingers and the fall of his hair. Hawk's eyes, ice-blue, bloodshot. Watching him so intently. "It is almost certain that the Wookiee had me in his sights during that entire conversation, and could easily have killed me with a single headshot. He did not. He only fired … after."

"You knew the Wookiee, didn't you. From … before."

"Yes," said Ren, bleakly, "Yes, I knew him of old, and that he would not have hit me in the side had he been aiming for my head. He saw what I had done, and he could have shot to kill, and – he did not."

"And you wish he had," said Hux.

It was worse when Hux said it, but not any less true.

"Yes. I wish he had."

And then Hux said "Fair enough," as if that was completely sufficient and he was satisfied. Ren shoved himself upright in the chair.

"What do you mean, _fair enough?"_

"Precisely what I said. What happened on Starkiller is what happened on Starkiller, and what you wish is what you wish, and pretending otherwise is not going to keep atmo in and vacuum out. I understand, Ren, at least the edges of it: I understand why one might wish that side-wound to have been a killing shot. But it wasn't, and you're stuck here, and I'm stuck here too, so we might as well accept it and try like hells to move on."

Ren stared at him. He seemed completely lucid, despite what was coming out of his mouth. He _believed_ what he was saying.

_You're stuck here, and I'm stuck here too –_

"Oh, for the sake of all space," Hux went on, "do you think you're the first man in history to have experienced failure? I'm … I .. I have my own worries, damn it, and I'm not sulking behind a mask because of them." He caught up the brandy and poured a long sip of it down his throat. "I'm sulking in private, behind closed doors, which is much more decorous."

"You're drunk," said Ren, with a terrible sense of wonder.

"Full marks for observation, that man."

"I should go."

"You should go," Hux agreed. "Leave the coat."

The coat was thrown over the back of Hux's chair, a fold of warm black wool. Muzzily, Ren realized he would miss it. "It's a very nice coat," he said. He'd said that before, hadn't he?. "Even if it doesn't fit me."

"You've been wearing my coat?" Hux asked, with such abrupt softness that Ren felt lost.

"It was cold," he said. He'd been confessing all evening; one more wouldn't matter. "I … couldn't sleep without it."

"Oh, _hells,_ " said Hux, and reached across the narrow distance between them. His fingers touched Ren's hair and Ren was shocked to utter stillness – that he'd _do_ such a thing, that he'd – slide his hand against his skull, and Ren was caught, trembling, unspun. He dared to lean into the weight of that touch, which didn't _move away,_ the current between them solid electricity and he reached up to wrap his own hands around Hux's wrist and hold him there.

The shiver that wracked Hux then was _revelation,_ a wild and unfolding thing, and Ren _reached_ for him, not thinking at all, only feeling _this_ and _yes_ and _you_ –

They held there for a long moment, poised at some perihelion, and then Hux pulled away. He was very pale; his cheeks were flushed like he'd been too near a fire.

He caught at the hand which had been in Ren's hair with his other, grasped and held it as if to keep it still. Stricken, he said, "I should not have done that. I apologize."

Ren found it in him to say "Not at all," unsure how he was managing to say it. "Your apology is accepted, only …"

"Only what?"

There weren't _words._ Not ones he could make himself speak.

_Only don't stop, next time,_ he sent, and watched Hux's eyes go wide. _I do not think that I can bear it._

The mask was a grim safety as he staggered to his feet; he put it on. "Good night," he said, before he could say anything worse – or _more_ –

"Good night," Hux replied.

Ren could feel his eyes on him all the way to the door.

**8 (II)**

The small closed space of the emergency shelter wasn't meant to hold more than one person and their gear, but at least it was heat-efficient. Ren knelt at the side of the bedroll in the dark, his insteps flat against the ground, his weight on his heels. He could stay that way for hours. He had been doing that: poised, his heart thudding incessantly against his ribs, waiting for Hux to drift back to the surface of consciousness. The wind outside had made high, keening sounds, and everything everywhere was terribly still.

The relief he'd felt when Hux had opened his eyes had been like the cracking of a frozen-over lake: whipcrack-sharp sound in the endless hush of winter. Now, leaning over Hux to adjust the temperature of the thermal blanket, he could feel those eyes on him, tracking, intent. Well: he did happen to be the brightest point in the dimness.

He could still feel his heartbeat, in his chest and in his hands.

"You came to find me," Hux said, which he'd said before.

"Of course I did," Ren said; _of course_ he had. If he hadn't, Hux wouldn't be here to point out the obvious.

"And you're … helping me."

"You appear to need it."

"I didn't know you could do … this," Hux said, by which he apparently meant _perform basic first aid and set up a tent._ Ren vividly recalled why he'd never gotten along with him on Starkiller: the man's complete belief that if he hadn't seen to a person's training himself, and checked it off on a spreadsheet, it _didn't exist._

"I have a few useful skills that do not involve my lightsaber," Ren told him, "which should come as a relief to you, since you find it so objectionable."

"It's stupid, your lightsaber," said Hux. Ren had never heard General Hux sound _petulant_ before, but here he was, managing it despite frostbite.

"So you've mentioned. I can put up a tent and use an emergency stove and even mix up instant orange drink powder without needing to have recourse to the instructions. My powers are vast."

And then Hux said, quite simply, "Thank you." 

People didn't _thank_ Kylo Ren; General Hux didn't thank anyone. Outside the wind had picked up again. That distant, sharpening sound; the whole of Kellan IV drowning in snow. Nothing in the world but the two of them in the dark.

_You're welcome,_ Ren sent him, when he found that he couldn't find the air to speak out loud.

It was a long time before Hux spoke again. Ren watched his face – still too pale, but not translucent anymore, at least not in this faint light.

"What you said before," Hux said.

"Which part?"

Hux closed his eyes. Ren felt their absence like an improbable wound. "Last night on the ship," he said, "You said … _next time, don't stop."_

He'd been drunk. Drunk on brandy and on the shimmering electric contact of Hux's hand in his hair. He hadn't been in his right mind. He hadn't been in his right mind since Starkiller. "Yes," he said, "Well. I was –"

"Come _here,"_ said Hux, all command, and reached up to him. 

It was like shattering apart, spinning soundless into vacuum: so _easy,_ after all, to lean close and let Hux plunge his fingers into the strands of his hair again. The shock of contact was no less strong for being repeated. It wasn't enough: Ren couldn't bear any distance at all, not in the dissolving warmth that flooded through him – he lay down beside Hux, pulled the thermal cover and Hux's magnificent coat over them both, and in the perfect clarity of that dissolve, curled his arms around him and pulled him close.

His head was on Ren's chest; his hands pressed open-palmed against Ren's ribs; all the bright shards of his mind wide-open and wordless, a cathedral space of flooding gold – was _that_ how he felt what Ren understood as _current,_ the wildfire nerve-sparks of _yes, this?_ Ren held on. It was unthinkable to do anything else when he could be wrapped around Hux, adrift in the breathlessness of relief – of being _allowed,_ of being safe and safety.

**4 (I)**

It turned out that, iced-over fury or not, General Hux would in fact appear in the room where Ren was convalescing – perfectly pressed, expression of profound annoyance in its usual place – in order to object to the simple fact that Ren had capabilities which were _inconvenient_ to him.

"I want answers," Hux was saying, from the chair next to Ren's bed that he'd perched himself in like a jessed and displeased falcon, "and I want my coat back, but I doubt you're the one I need to ask for that."

"It's a very nice coat," Ren said. It was; he _liked_ it, all the heavy weight of the wool over him – a realization he had no intention of mentioning to Hux. "I can understand why. What answers do you seek?"

"For one thing, how long have you been able to listen to my thoughts?"

He insisted on being so _chagrined!_ As if Ren had deliberately decided to annoy him, rather than being the one afflicted with the operatic volume of his every rumination. "I can hear _everyone's_ thoughts, General," Ren said, pleased at the slight widening of Hux's eyes, the lines of frustrated tension appearing as if by magic in his jaw. "I'm flattered you imagine the attention to be personal."

"So you've been aware of everything I think for the past … how long have we known each other?"

"Not _everything_ ," Ren said airily. "But, as I said, your mind is a particularly difficult one to ignore. Why does this bother you?"

Hux stared at him. "Why does this _bother_ me?"

Ren generously rephrased for his benefit. "Mm. What about it is objectionable?"

"Well, the utter disregard for privacy might have something to do with it," Hux said. "I don't suppose you could have _said_ something, by chance? This is like … it's like hearing that not only is someone casually rifling through your private belongings on a regular basis but that they have been doing so for _years._ Do you really not understand that, or are you just being obtuse because it amuses you?"

As if Ren should be expected to go around proclaiming that he was aware of everyone's most intense and most petty soliloquies. He imagined Hux would prefer that: a sort of public service announcement every time he entered a room. "I can't imagine why you mind so much," Ren told him. "It's not as if your thoughts are particularly interesting, after all."

Perhaps he could induce apoplexy. Crack that icy officious façade right down the center, without even having to get up. Hux's current expression suggested the possibility was not implausible.

"Most of them," Ren said, as if he was merely correcting a previous error. "The ones about your father, Commandant Hux … _those_ thoughts, General, do intrigue me."

Hux became very still, as if he'd been struck. Satisfying, but not satisfying enough.

Then he took a deep slow breath and asked, knife-sharp, "Tell me, Lord Ren, do you have _any_ redeeming characteristics at all?"

Ren had never been sure. 

Probably he didn't, not in the way Hux meant. His much-practiced ability to ignore the lick of hot, miserable shame – a flicker, nothing more substantial – _that_ had never counted to anyone but himself. "Well," he said, after a moment of contemplating the corrugated metal of the ceiling, which seemed easier to look at than Hux, "I'm tall, unlike some people. That's useful. And you will notice that while I am entirely capable of torturing you with my brain, General, I am not doing so _at this precise moment."_

"Don't threaten me," Hux said wearily. "It's gauche."

"Who said that was a threat? You asked a question and I answered it." He struggled up on his elbows. Hux was watching him, intent and exacting; he hadn't even flinched.

He'd come down here to – what? To have a fight, or to see if Ren was recovering, or both at once. But he'd come, and was sitting this close, without moving away. "You're not scared of me," Ren said.

"No," Hux agreed, "I'm not."

Ren caught his eyes, and held them – straight on, without blinking, and Hux didn't blink either. His irises were palest blue, the desaturated shade of winter sky. Ren thought of the stretching starlines of hyperdrive, of a windswept snowfield: ice-blue above reflecting ice-blue below. He _reached_ , in that way the Force could reach – past Hux's eyes and into his mind (like a wire, like that bone-bleached pier in the dark, leading onto the shore) – and found nothing but a kind of evanescing determination to not look away.

"You're not," he said, at last, and fell back against the pillows, looking away. "You know I could kill you, and you're not frightened of me."

**8 (III)**

Ren hovered in the space right before full wakefulness, too serenely warm to move or even to acknowledge that he had limbs that could shift or eyes that could open. Hux was still in his arms. Most of the warmth was some kind of shared creature which belonged to neither of them individually but flowed between them – a thing which was so uncomplicatedly _wonderful_ that Ren floated in the sensation of holding on.

He could hear Hux thinking. He always could, if he paid the right kind of attention. It wasn't exactly _listening in_ as much as not bothering to stop hearing. Curled together like this, he didn't even have to reach for him – just go open and receptive. He was –

– terribly concerned, in a way Ren couldn't quite make sense of, about Ren's own face. It was peculiar to see himself through someone else's eyes: like a strange distorted mirror, keyed to entirely different emotions.

Ren opened his eyes; they were inches from one another. Hux looked – startled. All the angles of his face were limned in the pale blue light of the morning filtering through the shelter's plastic walls. He was very beautiful, Ren decided.

"You think much too loudly," he told him, reaching to touch that face – Hux _turned into_ his hand, pressed his skin against Ren's palm. "It's like someone next door shouting at the top of their lungs. Or singing grand opera, as I believe I've pointed out."

"Sorry," Hux said, though he didn't sound sorry. "Did I wake you, thinking?"

"Not entirely," Ren told him. He traced the high fine-wrought line of Hux's cheekbone with his thumb. "But you do think an awful lot about my face, just recently. I can't imagine why."

Hux said, "I can't help it. It's easy to think about."

"You _like_ my face?" Ren had seen his own face; he'd seen it through Hux's eyes, even, and there was nothing particularly interesting about it aside from the new scar.

"Well, _yes._ Obviously."

"Why?"

"What? Why? It's … are you really asking me this or are you just trying to get a rise out of me?" 

Hux looked affronted. Ren didn't know why, as the question was a perfectly reasonable one, but yet here he was, scowling; not liking being doubted. Laughing, Ren reached up to outline the arch of his eyebrow, to trace a circle around the entire orbital ridge. "I'm asking you," he said.

"I like your face because it's _yours,_ " said Hux. "And because you're beautiful."

"I'm not, though," Ren protested. "Even without the scar."

Hux seemed to take this as a challenge. "Yes you are. Don't dispute my observational skills, Ren, it's rude. Do you have any idea how many times I've wanted to touch your hair? I keep thinking of you with snow caught in it."

"I can't understand why," said Ren, but he could see the images flicker behind Hux's eyes – a corona of stars, falling into his hair. He'd never thought of himself that way. The contrast, iceshine on black robes on snow. He realized he was smiling and didn't know how long he'd been doing it. "It's just hair."

"Yes," Hux said patiently, "But it's _your_ hair. I'm … not going to get the time to explain that in detail, am I?"

Ren reached out along all the Force-lines he could sense – the troopers were all alive, somewhere in the snow, and searching for them in a grid pattern that Hux would probably be pleased with. "I'm afraid not," he said. "We'll be found in approximately … seventeen minutes, I believe. You should probably put your boots back on and start looking officious. I don't think we have a comb, though. You'll have to do the best you can."

"Seventeen minutes?"

"Sixteen and a half."

"Hells," said Hux. "Forgive me for not being very good at this, will you?"

"Good at what?"

"This," said Hux, and then his hands were suddenly cupped around Ren's face, drawing him close, and his mouth was on his, hot and open and – _stunning,_ impossible.

He pulled back. His mouth was. The lines of it. He'd _done_ that. 

_Did … you just,_ Ren tried, helpless, _did that … did_ I…

_Yes,_ Hux sent, as if Ren had managed to ask him an intelligible question, instead of a decohering sequence of half-formed thoughts. He could still feel the imprint of his lips.

_Oh._

_Oh what?_ And behind that, a crystalline spreading fear, which – no. No, Ren wouldn't let him feel that way even for the moment it would take to explain his surprise.

_Oh, good,_ he thought, and laced his fingers behind Hux's skull, pulling him close enough to kiss back.

**4 (II)**

"My turn, if we are asking questions," Ren said. "Why did you come back for me?"

Hux raised an eyebrow, as if it was a very stupid question – it _was,_ but Ren had been thinking of it since Starkiller, in one way or another. Physical incapacitation allowed for far too much time to think of such things. To remember the bloody sky, the fast-dissolving world. He looked away from Hux.

"I told you. I had orders."

"It would have been perfectly feasible to avoid carrying that one out," Ren said, twisting the edge of his blanket between the pads of his fingers. "You must have had very little time left. Surely the simpler and safer option would have been to leave the planet immediately, rather than spending precious time locating and retrieving me."

"Yes," Hux said – at least he admitted it – "But I had orders."

There were orders and _orders._ There was being a stiff-spined martinet and then there was not bothering to rescue a creature you weren't even afraid of.

"Did you never question them?"

"Does it matter?"

_"Did you question them?"_ He must have; anyone sane would, and General Hux was, if nothing else, exquisitely sane.

_"Yes,"_ Hux snapped, and there, Ren had managed to pierce all that ice after all. "Yes, I questioned them. I thought about leaving you there. All right? Is that what you want to hear?"

"Why _didn't_ you?" he asked.

Hux shoved his hands into his hair, breaking all of the gelled-down strands into a tumble of bright rust. _"Now_ look what you made me do," he said, in a tone of utter frustration. "Why didn't I leave you there? I don't know, Ren. Possibly because I don't make it a habit to disobey orders in general, and particularly those of the Supreme Leader. Possibly because this whole mess is in large part your fault, not just mine, and I don't see why you shouldn't be there to bear your share of it. Possibly because I couldn't."

Because he _couldn't._ That made no sense at all. The rest of it was – fine, was explicable enough, Hux was the sort of person who would enact a rescue so he didn't get stuck with all the blame for a disaster, _fine,_ and of course he was as much Snoke's creature as Ren was, but –

"But you hate me," Ren said, and regretted everything about saying it. He sounded about thirteen.

"Oh, for the sake of all space, are we actually doing this?" Hux asked, exasperated. "I don't hate you. Well … not _hate._ Not most of the time. Hate is unprofessional and immature. I find practically everything about you profoundly irritating, and you go to considerable pains to maximize that irritation."

Maybe he didn't regret _everything_ about saying it. He seemed to have found a sort of methodology that made General Hux spill real opinions, however insulting – and to his face, instead of merely broadcast across all thirty decks of the _Finalizer._

It was perfectly reasonable to keep going. "You hate my lightsaber."

Hux sighed. "Yes, all right. I hate your lightsaber. Happy now?"

_No._ Not _enough._ Perhaps nothing would be.

"Why?" he asked, pushing.

"Why? Because it's showy and dangerous and unstable and you use it to chop up parts of my ship on a regular basis. Because the reason it looks that way is that it's _broken._ You're perfectly capable of building yourself a new one –"

Ren was.

"–that hasn't got a cracked crystal–"

That wasn't the _point._

"–and that isn't constantly threatening to slice your own stupid fingers off every time you switch it on –"

He had never even _burnt_ himself.

"–but no, you hang on to that thing despite the danger because you think it looks impressive and frightening and goes with your _aesthetic._ " Hux sighed. "And the mask is stupid, too. You don't need to hide behind a damn vocoder and a scowly-faced bucket to impress people. There, I've said it."

The mask was _useful._ More importantly, Hux had no understanding of symbolic power or the idea of _remaking_ yourself into someone else, someone better and stronger and less – less _you,_ than you were. Hux clearly had no idea about that at all.

"I'm not going to cut my own fingers off," Ren said, finally. It seemed necessary to get that much across. "I'm careful."

Hux just looked at him. 

Snidely, Ren added, "But I'm touched by your concern," in case Hux thought he hadn't paid sufficient attention to the litany of insults.

" _I'm_ more concerned with not becoming the entire First Order's laughingstock," Hux said drily. "Being remembered as the co-commander of somebody whose showy impractical headliner of a weapon exploded and took out thirty members of the officer corps is not exactly a recipe for glory."

"It's not going to _explode,_ " Ren said. He was profoundly, intensely annoyed; at least it felt better than being alone and bored. "It's under control."

"I'll remember that next time I need to requisition a new console," said Hux, which was _not fair._

And then he went on: "So, what did you mean this morning? About a conflict."

"Oh," Ren said, remembering: what he'd whispered into Hux's mind earlier. The green-white coils of paranoia – something about the gas in the hyperdrive generator, but that was just an _image,_ an image over the roiling slide of Hux's uncertainty. "That."

"Yes, that."

It would serve him right if Ren explained. "You don't want to go back," he said. "You don't want to go back to Snoke, because you're afraid of what he'll do, and you don't know what the future holds; but you don't feel like you have a choice."

It was simple enough to extrapolate. From Hux's expression, Ren thought he'd hit close to the mark. "I –"

Ren kept going: like skidding down the edge of a glass wall, easy and vicious. "And you don't want to take _me_ back, either, because you think that whatever Snoke plans on doing to you is going to be, most likely, more pleasant than what Snoke plans on doing to me. I fully concur with that prediction."

"You're his apprentice, though," Hux said.

As if that _mattered,_ where Snoke's evaluation of insufficiency was concerned. As if that meant anything other than _he should have done more, having greater ability and greater potential._

"Yes," Ren explained. "Which is why my failure will be a more personal insult to him than your own. You're just a soldier. There's nothing like so much at stake."

"He said he would complete your training himself."

If Hux meant that to be reassurance, he was not succeeding. "I have no doubt of it," Ren said – he didn't. If Snoke had been done with him he would have bled out into the snow; simple. Quiet. _Finished._ "You don't know the extent to which I failed, General. You think you do, but you are mistaken."

"Tell me."

Why would he want to know? Surely he _didn't;_ it was merely the sort of thing General Hux, he of battle-orders and spreadsheets and the false omniscience of being _in charge of things,_ would ask – he didn't want to hear Ren explain the endless, horrible way Solo had fallen from the gantry bridge; the equally endless and horrible realization of Ren's own failure afterward.

And yet: what if he _did._

Ren reached out one more time, like he had when he'd been caught in Hux's blue-ice gaze; insinuated himself into the clean and tidy space of Hux's mind, the impression of a high-ceilinged vault, cold air – and found nothing but genuine curiosity.

"You really mean that," he realized he was saying, pulling away. "You actually mean it."

"I don't say things I don't mean. Tell me."

"I –" Ren said, and imagined beginning – imagined how far _back_ he would have to begin. "I can't."

"All right," Hux said. "But if you change your mind, I'd like to hear it." 

There was no command in it; only a grim certainty that having all the parameters of a situation laid out clearly was a better tactical decision and – Ren found himself nodding, slowly. The corners of Hux's lips curled up, amused.

Ren opened his mouth to ask, "What's so funny?" and was interrupted by an emotional wave of relief and satisfaction which was rolling out across the entire ship. "—hang on," he said, lifting his hand, trying to keep Hux quiet long enough to pinpoint the source of the thoughts. From Engineering: they must have finished the hyperdrive repair. They would be on their way to Snoke's base, soon.

No time to change his mind: all traces of this conversation – the longest, he suspected, that he and Hux had ever had – would vanish into irrelevance. 

"What –" Hux said, and then his comlink beeped. Ren wouldn't need to explain.

_Bridge to General Hux_.

"Hux. Go ahead."

_"General, Engineering reports that the hyperdrive generator repair is complete and the generator is fully functional. We are ready to make the jump to lightspeed on your command."_

For a long time, he and Hux looked at one another. Ren felt as if they were preserving some last vestige of a hidden world, something which would dissolve along with the starlines of that hyperspace jump.

_I have to do this_ , Hux sent, at last, like shouldering up a weight. 

_I know._

**9**

Hux's quarters on the _Dark Heart_ were spare. They lacked any personality save an overall impression of _efficiency;_ nevertheless, having locked the door behind him, Ren felt as if he'd stolen himself away from the world. No one save Hux knew where he was. No one on the ship would look for him here. He had made the universe outside this room vanish, for this brief span of time – a trick Snoke had never managed. Hux was asleep on the narrow bunk. When Ren had arrived he'd looked attenuated, glass-spun, bruised shadows under his eyelashes. Ren had thought of curling around him with a vivid intensity that was entirely new.

But it was a very small bunk, and he'd wake; then the medical droids would set up an endless litany of complaining. So Ren had covered him with his coat instead, and taken some satisfaction in how, even in sleep, he had relaxed under its weight. 

There wasn't much to _do_ in Hux's quarters. Aside from watch Hux breathe, and while that was far more enjoyable as an activity than Ren had previously considered plausible, it nevertheless rapidly exhausted itself as a source of entertainment. Ren paced – looked for something to read that was not the safety regulations manual that every room on every First Order ship had a copy of – failed miserably – and then discovered Hux's own datapad in the drawer of his desk.

That would do.

(It wasn't as if he was going to _leave._ No.)

He sat at the desk, arranging himself as he imagined Hux would sit, straight-spined, feet flat on the floor, and got started.

It turned out there were an astounding number of policy papers in the galaxy, and most of them were on Hux's datapad. Along with a staggering quantity of troop movement and supply spreadsheets, and trooper dossiers, and the schematics for large portions of the _Finalizer_ – and an enormous partition full of _music._ Old music. Multiple recordings of individual pieces, categorized and catalogued by some method of Hux's own design that Ren could only guess at the intricacies of.

"Hey," Hux said, from the other side of the room. Awake, leaning up on one elbow. Ren couldn't help smiling, nor the wild surge of delight that came from _looking_ at him. It was going to be a problem – not the most difficult problem (that was the twining, klaxon-ache pull of the light – how he felt infiltrated by it, like it was a drawing poison that had settled in the long bones of his arms and thighs, that he was ignoring) but a problem. "That's mine."

"Yes," Ren told him, "Of course it's yours, we're in your room. How are you feeling?"

"You don't just _read_ other people's _datapads,_ Ren. There are private things on there."

Ren put the pad down and came over to the bunk. "I was bored," he explained. "Anyway, your private settings aren't particularly scandalous. You do have a lot of storage space taken up by music, I must say."

"See," Hux said, looking up at him, "this is why people don't like you. One of the reasons. Other than the ways you work tremendously hard to be unlikeable, which, as I may have mentioned, are legion. Just because you _can_ look into people's heads, or their private data storage settings, does not mean you _should._ "

"Does it bother you?" Ren asked him. He sat down next to him on the edge of the bunk, close enough to feel the bleed of body-warmth through coverlet and coat. He _liked_ knowing that Hux collected music and filed it in an incomprehensibly-complex personal system. He even liked knowing about the number of policy papers that existed, and that Hux apparently _read_ them. 

"Yes," Hux said, with a cloudless smile, and reached up – Ren leaned into his hands, still shocked, still dizzy every time – "Yes it does," Hux was saying, so Ren told him, "I see," bent down into an arch, kissed him. They weren't any good at it, Ren suspected, and it didn't matter at all: what seemed to matter was how they were falling into one another, a wide and endless descent into joy, and Ren had never, not once in his life, felt this much about _anything_ that wasn't founded in rage or pain. 

When he pulled away Hux caught at one of his hands in both of his like a struck claim, the fine strong bones of his fingers closing around Ren's palm and drawing it to his chest. They didn't speak; the rules of the stolen-away world in this room didn't seem to permit it, didn't seem to _need_ it – there was only how Hux was looking up at him – and he was thinking of rules because Hux was thinking of rules.

Gently, Ren said, "You think –"

"Too much. Yes. I do. Don't let me."

That Hux would _ask_ him for that. Ren didn't know what to do with the ache that spilled through his chest, like spiral fractures down every rib. "Ah, there you might have found the limit of my power," he said, lacing his fingers through Hux's, as gently as he could –

**2**

"Let me see," Ren said, and General Hux held out his hand to him, like a man acquiescing to inevitability.

Despite the gloves the General habitually wore, his hand was swollen-hot. Ren drew his fingertips down over the metacarpals and across the knuckles. Even without the Force to guide him he'd have guessed that some of Hux's fingers were broken – crushed, the joints shoved against each other until they snapped. He thought of the small bones, stretched out like bleached-wood piers into the dark – of hanging onto them – and winced. Carefully, he began to work the glove down and off.

It was as bad as he'd guessed. The bruises were livid, red-black shading to dull yellow. 

(It was always as bad as he'd guessed, or worse.)

"Did I do this?" he asked.

Hux refused to look at him, which was answer enough. "You were out of your head," he said. "I just held on while the droid knitted you back together, that's all."

"Two of these fingers are broken," Ren said, abruptly furious-sick at himself and so _tired._ He didn't know why Hux had _let_ him do that. It made as little sense as sitting here now, Hux's hand in his, tracing over the breaks with his fingertips. There was a scrim of dizzy pain over the whole room: Hux's hand, his own side, the needle-pressure headache like an ever-increasing mechanical hum that turned light into _weight_ and thought into _fog,_ depressingly familiar. "It must have hurt you a great deal. And – gone on hurting." 

"Can I have my hand back now?" 

And yet he did not pull away. Ren looked with the Force, rifled through the past two days of Hux's memory like snatching pages out of a bound book.

" _And_ you have barely slept," he said, "not to mention being ill with exhaustion and migraine. And sought no help, General?"

"It's a headache," Hux told him. Terribly resigned, as if everything had already ended, had already gone to pieces along with the skin of Starkiller, and there was no point in anything in the long grey aftermath. He asked Ren, "Can you stop doing … whatever it is you're doing, please?" 

_Please._

_He'd_ done this – not all of it but _enough_ of it. And everything _had_ already ended, _was_ already in pieces. "I can help," Ren found himself saying, with a kind of desperate, sudden freedom; it didn't matter, there was no point, so he _could._ He knew how. "I can fix this. Will you let me?"

For an agonizing moment Ren was sure, as blindingly sure as he'd ever been, that Hux would spin on his heel and stalk away into the _Finalizer._ He'd go back into the machinery of the First Order and it would devour him like his superweapon had devoured itself. Snoke wouldn't – Ren absolutely could not think about what Snoke would do, now, to General Hux or anyone else. There was only a sibilant and endless darkness there. Everything broken. Every possibility lost –

Hux shut his eyes. "Fix me," he said. He looked as if he had stepped off a cliff. Was falling, still. "Fix me. I seem to need it."

Force healing was mostly matter manipulation: tiny adjustments inside the delicate network of cell and bone inside a living body, _rearrangement._ If Ren thought about it as simply moving very small objects it was comprehensible – increasing or decreasing the pressure of the Force on a filament of smashed bone, moving it into place. Detail work – but like a gold shimmer that sliced apart the grey haze of pain, the Light side cut through him, too. Raw anguish, a shattering – he didn't _care_ , he knew how to fix this one thing, and he _would,_ the snap of setting bones in Hux's hand a warm, exhausting satisfaction of repair.

It took a long time. When he was done he let Hux take his hand back, and tried to catch his breath, his eyes squeezed shut. Every inhalation was an ricochet of pain from the bowcaster wound in his side to the open slice of his face and back again.

"Are you all right?" Hux demanded, as if that _mattered._

"I can't do anything about the headaches," he managed, between gasps. "But you should be able to use the hand now." 

"Thank you," said Hux. Ren nodded, his eyes still closed: seeing seemed too difficult to be borne. Besides, there was an echo of that healing warmth between them, a resonant frequency plucked like a string, vibrating. 

He pulled away; got out of Hux's mind entirely. 

Abruptly Hux took _his_ hand, in both of his this time. Strange, shocking-sweet: no reason for it, and General Hux was not unreasoning.

"Thank you," Hux said again, so Ren opened his eyes to look at him.

**10**

_Are you there?_ Hux, across the _Dark Heart,_ reaching for _him:_ his mind an unwinding mechanism, weighing choices and memories and analysis, distilling Snoke and Starkiller and all of Ren's failures into a syllogism with a hole at its heart, a missing point of information.

Ren knew it, though he wasn't sure he _wanted_ to know it. He'd been listening for a while, taking greedy casual sips of Hux's thoughts from far away, like a man drinking sugar water to survive without rations.

_Mm. You've certainly been … thinking._

_It's a thing I do sometimes._

Ren tried not to be charmed; gave up on trying without much concern for _that_ failure. _I have been thinking, as well,_ he thought, and realized that he had already made the decision: he would show Hux the entirety of the Supreme Leader's fixation on the balance between the dark and the light. 

_Snoke,_ Hux said, _It's Snoke, isn't it. That's what's missing. The missing piece._

_Yes._

_What did he say to you?_

_Do you really want to know?_

_Yes._

So Ren showed him. Spun memory for him like a story from deck to deck: 

_The historians have it all wrong. It was neither poor strategy nor arrogance that brought down the Empire. You know too well what did._

_Sentiment,_ Ren had replied, then. 

There was a betrayal in the telling of it, but it was so small. Only the betrayal of spilling confidences, of confession, and Ren wanted to explain more than he wanted to be perfectly Snoke's, his armament and student and creation – wanted, horribly, with the slow crawl of the light up and down his spine, to tell Hux _everything._

_He goes on about your particular suitability because of your, what, dual nature?_ Hux asked. _Dark and light together. But why do I get the strong impression that it's the dark he wants?_

_The dark side is not stronger,_ Ren said, _But it is more...applicable, to Snoke’s purposes. It may help if you think of alloys: a slight amount of one metal added to another makes a third which may be much stronger than either of its individual components._

Somewhere, Hux was staring at the starfield: the thousand bright points. _And you wanted to extinguish the light._

_It is...painful. The pull from opposing sides._

_It hurts?_ Hux asked, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

_Yes. All the time._

_Is there anything that can be done?_

An absurd question – and yet, Hux had _asked_ it, had asked it with a sort of flashpoint of concern that Ren could feel like a vibration in the air, the currents of the light singing like the burst of a pulse pistol in a room full of accelerant. Pain like _fire_. Carefully, he said, _It seems that being near you sometimes makes it better. And sometimes it makes it … very much worse._

_Oh. I. I didn't know. I'm sorry._

_Of course you didn't know,_ Ren said, as gently as he could. _I'm telling you._

_I have a little while left,_ Hux replied, _before my first meetings are scheduled. Is now – a time when having me around would help, or exactly the opposite?_

There were, it turned out, not only gradations in inexplicable feelings but gradations in longing; as if wanting to be near Hux was an amplifying frequency to the vast sine-wave ache of pain. _Exactly the opposite, I'm afraid,_ he said, regretting it. _Don't worry. I'm fine, and I have things I need to do. These – phases – don't seem to last very long, I am coming to understand._

_Fair enough,_ Hux sent. Ren could feel him reassembling the analytic machinery of his mind, the intent focus: layering _necessity_ over uncertainty like familiar armor. The flicker of snowfall, earthquakes. 

_I'm sorry_ , he sent, helplessly.

_I know,_ Hux thought. _So am I. I don’t...think either of us ever imagined this was going to be easy, Ren. But as I said, I_ don’t _want it to go away._

It would be so much simpler to _not want_. Ren had known that for as long as he'd known anything, from the earliest days under his uncle's training: it would be simpler to not want. To not feel. 

He'd never managed it, not even once. 

Reaching, like a hand extended, he thought: _Neither do I._


End file.
